Annual web sales at Fogdog.com have been essentially flat at about $17 million for the past couple of years, but that fact by itself isn’t a big cause of concern for GSI Commerce Inc., which owns and operates the site.
These days GSI Commerce, which acquired the online sporting goods site in 2000, sees Fogdog more as a research and development arm for the emerging third-party services it offers to its roster of retailer clients rather than as a pure e-commerce sales stream. “Because this is the only site we own we do not use it as a competitive store versus our partners' stores,” says Michael R. Conn, GSI Commerce senior vice president of corporate development. “We treat Fogdog as a testing lab for new services and technology, which in turn helps us add more value to our partners' sites.”
In the last year, GSI Commerce, which provides third-party services, including e-commerce platform operations and fulfillment, for about 54 retailers, has been adding programs such as helping retailers with their online marketing initiatives.
At Fogdog, GSI is currently researching and developing new one-on-one marketing services it will roll out at a later date to its clients. For instance, Fogdog is currently developing and testing e-mail campaigns that eventually GSI Commerce clients can use to pinpoint on which days of the week their customers are likely to respond to a promotion and make a purchase. “We've tested various e-mail lists and maintenance techniques,” says Conn. “We’ve tested how well various triggered e-mail events work and how to re-engage the customer through e-mail marketing.”
GSI Commerce is also using FogDog, No. 231 in the Internet Retailer Top 400 Guide to Retail Web Sites, to develop better strategies for conducting natural and paid search campaigns and help clients personalize their individual e-commerce sites. “While the sales on the site are nice we don't emphasize the site or do anything that places it in a competitive situation with our other partners' sporting goods sites,” says Conn. “Fogdog is more or less our research site.”
GSI Commerce sees interactive marketing as another value-added third-party service to offer to web and multi-channel retailers. The company formed an interactive marketing services department earlier this year. “With Fogdog research projects we take the results, measure them and show them to our partners,” Conn says. “They will then participate with us in making decisions on how to implement a new service or marketing campaign that will yield more sales.”
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